Hank and Erika Kirtland laugh when they consider the series of circumstances that first conspired to bring them together — and then threatened to keep them apart.

For one thing, he wasn”t even supposed to be in his hometown of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1955 — the same time Erika arrived from then-West Germany to live with a local family.

A year earlier, Hank had graduated from high school, and his parents relocated the family from Pewaukee, west of Milwaukee, to Florida for his mother”s health. He spent his freshman year at a college in Florida, but wasn”t fond of the Sunshine State”s more muggy tropical climate, so he returned to Wisconsin to start his sophomore year at what is now the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, southwest of Pewaukee.

But that plan got derailed when Hank, trying to earn money for school, fell off a ladder installing storm windows. He suffered a concussion and broke his arm. No longer able to work, he decided to quit school and return to Florida to recover at his parents” home.

The day before he left, he dropped by some old family friends to say goodbye. They invited him to come along to visit another family, the Weeks, whom Hank knew slightly.

Depressed about leaving school, and his arm in pain, Hank wasn”t excited about the social call but was unable to refuse. Once at the Weeks home, he grew bored with the older adults” conversation, so he excused himself to go outside into their yard, which overlooked Pewaukee Lake.

He was throwing rocks into the lake when Erika came out to talk to him. The hostess, Mrs. Weeks, had sent her German houseguest to cheer up Hank and make a new American friend.

“She was awfully good looking,” Hank remembers. She also spoke English pretty fluently. That”s because, though raised in West Germany, she had been born in India when her father worked there; English was actually her first language. Hank also learned she was in the United States on a one-year visa; her father was a business associate of Mr. Weeks, and Erika was working as Mr. Weeks” secretary.

Hank and Erika”s first conversation was pleasant but lasted just half an hour. That probably would have been the end of their acquaintance, only Mrs. Weeks — “a woman you don”t refuse” — insisted Hank write Erika from Florida.

So, Hank and Erika exchanged a few cards, and Hank returned to Wisconsin after the holidays to resume work and save for school. He and Erika started dating, and eventually things got serious enough that Hank considered joining the Army so he could get stationed in West Germany after Erika returned home.

But now things became complicated. When Hank revealed to a recruiter that he was in love with a girl in Hamburg, the recruiter told him he”d wind up in the infantry. Cold War security concerns would keep a soldier with a local German girlfriend out of the most interesting postings.

So Hank and Erika, now sending letters back and forth across the Atlantic every few days, came up with Plan B. He enlisted but asked to be sent for electronics and aerospace technology training at the Army”s Nike missile system school in El Paso, Texas.

Now, it was Erika”s job to get to America, but another complication arose, this time having to do with an obscure rule in U.S. immigration policy covering national origins quotas. Her birth in Calcutta put her in the category of native Indians, who, at the time, might have to wait years for visas to immigrate to the United States.

“I was very depressed when I went home that evening and told my father,” Erika recalls. “He laughed when I mentioned one way around the quota — if he had some kind of diplomatic status.” Her father, indeed, had that. While working in Calcutta in the 1930s, his boss was the Swiss consul, and he briefly filled in as acting consul when the boss returned to Europe for a few months.

Erika arrived in El Paso the winter 1958, but another hurdle loomed. The minister at the church Hank attended frowned on soldiers marrying women from other countries, saying he had seen a too many cross-cultural marriages fall apart.

“He tried his best to talk me out of it,” Hank says. “I didn”t care. That”s somebody else he was talking about, I thought, which is probably what everybody thinks.”

Hank and Erika prevailed, and the minister married them on March 28, 1958, with his parents, an aunt and uncle, Erika”s sister and a few other friends in attendance. He finally met his German in-laws more than a year later after their first child was born.

His army training helped him eventually land work in electronics, first in New Jersey. In 1971, the couple and their four children moved to the South Bay, where Hank had a job at G.E. They eventually settled in Cupertino. The early 1970s, before the name “Silicon Valley” was attached to the region, was an exciting time, Hank says. “There was something in the air,” says Hank, who eventually worked in high tech in writing and marketing. “It was so dynamic. There were things going on all the time.”

Now with eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild, the two often reflect back on that meeting by Pewaukee Lake.

“Erika was sent out to entertain me, and she”s been entertaining me ever since,” Hank says.

If you want to share the story of how you and your partner or best friend met, send an email to mross@bayareanewsgroup.com with the subject line “how we met.”